Hi Ian,

> > Does anyone have any alternate experience in these podcasts, etc, that
> > indicates it is finding a market place in real business?

You aren´t the market.

There are several different markets:

People that drive their own car to work
People that go by train
People that go by bus
...

Each of those market has their specific products. Radio works for people that go by car. Podcasts, Blackberry, IPod ... are for people that go by train/bus. (There is even a distinction between the train and the bus, but I don´t remember the details at the moment. It´s mostly about devices that need 2 hands, and devices that need just one hand.)

Podcasts are adressing a specific market, and I am quite sure that they actually work in their market. But they don´t work at all outside that market. So if you don´t go by bus/train, Podcasts aren´t made for you.

iang wrote:

> > had to spend an entire hour or so listening to the scratchy sound, with
> > a drop out in a critical part, when I could have skimmed the same
> > written content in about 2 minutes. The nice way of putting this is

No mp3/ogg download?

> > that it's not ready for recommendation to my business partners as yet,
> > and a slightly less nice way is "who has time for that?"

As for who has time, lots of people spend lots of time commuting to/from work in most major cities, pre-download mp3 podcasts and listen while commuting.

> > Does anyone have any alternate experience in these podcasts, etc, that
> > indicates it is finding a market place in real business?

talkshoe.com has an interesting business model, or at least the foundation part, sort of like a radio/talk show in an interview format, but with a whole bunch of integration so the "show" control can easily be controlled by anyone/anywhere and it automatically becomes available as a download in ogg/mp3 once the conference finishes.

They fail in a number of other areas such as promises of advertising pay-outs and lots of ticked off users going else where.

They also fail to build a much larger international community via VoIP as they're too busy trying to get tiny fractions of pennies per minute per listener. Rather then rejecting any VoIP calls above their preset limit they just drop packets which leaves people wondering if they are
having other issues yada yada.

The presentation of characters for prospective production generally is available for those that might be interested in podcast to a limited number of people to keep the information private but available for animations. The synopsis with demo type pictures and voice allow people that write checks to view it prior to wasting their time. Small casting of daily rushes are common and involve a limited virtual reality because they are dealing with real productions.